The following text is an expanded version of Peter Dale Scott's Talk at Berkeley, September 24, 2006, entitled "9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out.”

I want to talk tonight about using the 9/11 Report as evidence – evidence of what is being suppressed. We can use it in this way because some parts of the Report are accurate and reliable. This base line of reliability helps define other parts of the Report which are misleading, and in a few places I believe dead wrong. These relevant omissions and deceptions should be taken as clues as to what is being suppressed, and where the hidden truth lies.

I shall talk of the Report’s occasional resistance to the truth. Let me give an easy and incontrovertible analogy from the Warren Report. The Warren Report got many things right; but it also minimized the links between Jack Ruby and organized crime.1 This resistance was a clue that Ruby in fact was crime-related and that this was important. The House Select Committee on Assassinations, even though they got many things wrong, amply confirmed the importance of Ruby’s crime links.

We find similar symptomatic resistance in the 9/11 Report.

1) Here is an easy example: the identity of the hijackers. The FBI had distributed a list naming 18 of the 19 alleged hijackers by 10 AM on 9/11.2 Within two weeks the identities of at least six of the hijackers were unclear; as men in Arab countries with the same names and histories, and in some cases the same photographs, were protesting that they were alive and innocent.3 In response to these protests, FBI Director Robert Mueller soon acknowledged that the identity of several of the suicide hijackers was in doubt.4 But there is no discussion of this problem in the detailed treatment of the alleged hijackers in the 9/11 Commission Report.5

2) WTC-7. This is obviously a big area of doubt, as you have just heard. The Report’s solution was not to mention WTC-7 at all. And yet Kean and Hamilton, the 9/11 Commission Co-Chairs, have the nerve to claim in their new book that after the Report “those believing conspiracy theories now had to rely solely on imagination, their theories having been disproved by facts.”6 In other words, they are still covering up that there was a cover up.

3) The U.S. government’s intimate on-going connection to al-Qaeda and a chief 9/11 plotter.

In our book, 9/11 and Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out, I wrote of Ali Mohamed, the close ally of Osama bin Laden and his mentor Ayman al-Zawahiri.7 It is now generally admitted that Ali Mohamed (known in the al Qaeda camps as Abu Mohamed al Amriki — "Father Mohamed the American")8 worked for the FBI, the CIA, and U.S. Special Forces. As he later confessed in court, he also aided the terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, a co-founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and by then an aide to bin Laden, when he visited America to raise money.9